After Hours — 10 Films With Lousy First Dates

Participants: Mousy, woebegone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) and vivacious, beautiful Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette)

Circumstances: Paul, a sweet but lonely office worker, happens to meet the seductive Marcy in a café, who gives him her number and suggests he come visit her place downtown. Paul, genuinely thrilled, decides to keep the night going and takes a cab to her studio apartment. Once there, things get more and more peculiar as Marcy becomes moody and seems to want nothing to do with him and Paul finds a book about severe bodily disfigurement and assumes Marcy herself is somehow mutilated.

What Makes It Awful? Sadly, this is just the beginning of poor Paul's miserable night. He loses all his money early and, despite every noble attempt to get back to his neighborhood, he's continually trapped in the dreaded art district. Along the way, he meets various peculiar characters and gets more and more deeply entrenched in trouble, eventually running afoul of a pair of female artists, a group of punks in a nightclub, various other odd entities, a Mister Softee truck, and, finally, an unruly mob, determined to thrash him.

Outcome: Later that night, Marcy commits suicide, and Paul is forced to hide out in the basement of yet another artist who turns him into a living sculpture encased in plaster-of-paris, before he is unceremoniously bumped off a truck right in front of the office building in which he works. He dusts himself off and trudges back to another soul-draining day in his cubicle.